The Presidential Republic

J. Blondel

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2015
• Print ISBN: 9781137482488
• eBook ISBN: 9781137482495
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: African Politics
• Index: Social Sciences

This book is about a variety of national arrangements and practices, whose common characteristics are to constitute 'presidential republics' and which as such have become the main form of government in the contemporary world.

1

Introduction: The Need to Study the ‘Presidential Republic’ as a General Phenomenon of Contemporary Government

This book is about a variety of national arrangements and practices, whose common characteristics are to constitute ‘presidential republics’ and which as such have become the main form of government in the contemporary world. It is more realistic to refer to ‘presidential republics’ than to ‘presidential systems’ as what characterises these regimes is, on the one hand, the major importance given to the presidency in a formal document of the State, typically a constitution, and, on the other hand, the key part openly played by the president above all other players in national decision-making, indeed whether that constitutional document is closely applied, ill-applied or scarcely applied.

1 The ‘presidential republic’ as the most widespread form of government in the contemporary world (Table 1.1)

In the contemporary world, the presidential republic is to be found particularly in Latin America, Africa and the countries of the ex-Soviet Union; it exists also, but to a more limited extent, in Asia and only to a very limited extent in Europe, even in East-central Europe. The whole ‘movement’ started in the United States, where the notion was truly ‘invented’ in the federal Constitution of 1787 and where it was maintained successfully ever since. From then on, the idea of presidentialism spread and even had a vast development since the second half of the twentieth century; but these regimes often experienced serious problems, to say the least.

The idea of the presidential republic was introduced in Spanish Latin America in as early as the second decade of the nineteenth century, but its implementation was often uneven both early on and later, throughout that century and beyond. On the other hand, there was almost no move towards the adoption of that model elsewhere in the world up to the middle of the twentieth century, except for the fact that Brazil, which had been a parliamentary monarchy from independence in 1822, also became a presidential republic in 1889. After World War II, however, the presidential republic was almost universally adopted in newly independent Africa and in the countries which emerged from the break-up of the Soviet Union in the early 1990s: but there were also serious problems with the form the implementation of the model took in both cases, although there was at least marked stability in the formal presidential arrangements in the countries which emerged from the ex-Soviet Union.

Since, despite the difficulties which it often encountered, the presidential republic has now been extended widely across the world, that model of government must have corresponded to a need in a large number of countries, however unclearly felt that need might have been by the populations concerned: yet the phenomenon has not been studied in general, despite of its worldwide importance in the development of political systems since the late eighteenth century. Indeed, it is not only that the phenomenon has not been studied generally: it is that the diversity of the arrangements has been regarded by many as so large that the basic unity of the notion of the presidential republic has not been recognised, indeed it has even been denied. There was for a long time a view that Latin American presidencies were so ‘imperfect’, so to speak, that they could not be genuinely compared with the American model; this standpoint was gradually abandoned, but a similar kind of rejection then applied to African presidencies and probably to most ex-Soviet Union presidencies: they were too ‘imperfect’ to belong to the same category as American or even Latin American presidentialism!

There are obviously many reasons for this lack of general study, one of which is unquestionably the existence of major differences among the various forms, constitutional as well as customary, which presidential republics have taken: yet it is prima facie surprising that there should not have been any attempt to examine these many forms together and, in the process, to try and understand why the idea of presidentialism has been so attractive, first in the early part of the nineteenth century and, second, from the second half of the twentieth.

Without presuming to provide a systematic picture of the reasons which may have accounted for the lack of a general interest among political scientists in the wide spread of presidentialism across the world, alongside what can be felt to be the ‘imperfection’ of many of these regimes, one can at least note four characteristics which may have been at the root of that curious state of affairs. One of these characteristics has to do with the fact that the study of truly worldwide comparative government is still not highly developed: this is in large part because the subject has been compartmentalised into ‘areas’, such as Latin America, Africa, the ex-Soviet Union, East and Southeast Asia, South Asia and ‘the West’. This means that there is little incentive, if there is any at all, for specialists of Africa to draw lessons from what happens and happened in Latin America or elsewhere.

The second characteristic relates to the fact that comparative government specialists appear to believe too easily that much weight can be placed on constitutional provisions, unless, on the contrary, no weight is placed on these provisions at all: in reality one should recognise that there is a large ‘in between’ situation which has to be studied. One thus needs to assess empirically whether particular provisions of the constitutions of given countries are used or not used at a particular time. This is a stringent requirement, to be sure: one can understand that, in many cases, it should be difficult to be absolutely sure of what has been taking place; but there are so many ways in which constitutional arrangements can be circumvented, almost everywhere in the world, that one must at least be continuously aware of the dangers of generalising on particular points without sufficient evidence.

2 The rather controversial question of the possible relationship between the concept of the presidential republic and democracy

The third characteristic which may well have militated against a general approach to the study of presidential republics appears to be the question of the possible relationship between presidential government and democracy. That issue is not only in itself difficult to solve, as what might constitute a democratic polity is open to many highly complex definitions and the content of the concept of ‘democracy’ is consequently highly contested (among recent works see in particular Lyons, 2013); but the matter is rendered particularly difficult to handle in view of the many types of presidential republics which have come to emerge across the world. While it is manifestly not improper to raise the question of democracy, it is surely premature to do so as long as the characteristics of the various presidential republics are not precisely known. The notion that the question should be aired generally seems to be based on the idea that there is a sense in which presidential republics are inherently democratic in view of their basic characteristics and, above all, in view of the fact that one of these key characteristics is the fact that the office of president is to be filled by men and women (almost always) directly elected by the people. It would then follow from this standpoint that countries which are not regarded as democratic cannot be described as being presidential republics.

The notion that there is an inherent linkage between presidentialism and democracy is the conclusion which has to be drawn from what is stated in a classic volume of Mainwaring and Shugart on the subject, which begins in the following way:

This book addresses two fundamental issues. First, it addresses the current debate regarding the liabilities and merits of presidential government. Does presidentialism make it less likely that democratic government will be able to manage political conflict, as many prominent scholars have argued recently? ... These questions about the general desirability of presidentialism have been at the core of a first generation of recent comparative studies of presidentialism ... Second, we examine variations among different presidential systems, the implications of these variations for executive-legislative relations and their consequences for democratic government and stability. (1997, 1)

When these authors state that the questions relating to presidential government about ‘the general desirability of presidentialism’ are connected with the idea that presidentialism makes it more or less likely that ‘democratic government will be able to manage political conflict’, they appear to believe that presidentialism is inherently ‘democratic government’ or perhaps is the most likely form which ‘democratic government’ takes. Yet such a conclusion can be drawn only if there are reasons to believe that something in the ‘essence’ of presidentialism makes it democratic or at least more democratic than any other system of government. Even if one leaves aside the fact that the determination of what constitutes ‘democratic government’ is far from clear, the only characteristic of presidential government which might be regarded as suggesting that the system is ‘essentially’ democratic is the fact that the head of the executive, the president, is elected by the people, indeed typically directly: why such a provision would make the system ‘essentially’ democratic is wholly uncertain, however. As a matter of fact, if one is to look for a ‘virtue’, in Montesquieu’s terms, of the presidential republic, it is not that it is ‘democratic’, but that it is ‘populistic’. The aim is not to reduce the originality and the systemic validity of the presidential republic: it is merely to point out that the presidential form of government was introduced in cases in which it was simply unrealistic to adopt any other model, monarchical or parliamentary republican.

3 Presidential republics have tended to emerge in ‘new’ countries

At this point, the fourth characteristic which militates against the unity of presidential republics is the fact that one major ‘condition’, so to speak, has affected, if not all presidential republics, at least the very large majority of them, namely the fact that they had been colonies. As a result, presidential republics inherited two features which came to be summarised under the expression of ‘new’ countries: the consequences had not been at least fully encountered in the case of countries created in Western Europe in the nineteenth century, such as Belgium, or in the Balkans, such as Serbia, Romania or Bulgaria, in part because these were set up as monarchies, not as republics; but the consequences were felt in the other continents. Before World War II, the only ‘new’ countries which existed outside Europe were the Latin American states which had ceased to be colonies of Spain or Portugal and had become independent. Over a century after the setting up of these countries, the fact that these were ‘new’ had become less noticeable: yet this was precisely the moment when a very large ‘batch’ of ‘new’ countries emerged. After World War II, another decolonisation process resulted in markedly larger numbers of ‘new’ countries, mainly in Africa, but also in parts of Asia.

Whether these countries should be labelled ‘new’ is naturally controversial: it is manifestly a Euro-centred concept. What is clear, however, is that the countries concerned faced a special and very serious handicap, namely that they lacked the ‘traditions’ typically felt to be required for regular and legitimate forms of government to prevail. They could therefore be liable to major political upheavals and in particular to be taken over by ‘usurpers’. Naturally enough, these countries were not ‘new’ in the sense that the territories in which they emerged did not exist previously: they were ‘new’ both because their borders and, perhaps even more seriously, the political arrangements which they came to acquire after independence had no or very few roots in the past. The colonisation process had typically led to a break from the traditions, often very strong ones, of the inhabitants of these countries: this had not occurred in the United States, as the Thirteen Colonies were ruled by ‘immigrants’, mainly from the British Isles, and had typically experienced a form of representative government at the level of each of these colonies.

The United States was thus not really a ‘new’ country in the same sense that Latin American and African independent countries were as they emerged from a colonisation process which had been essentially run by civil servants from the ‘mother country’ and was based on territorial divisions which scarcely took into account those which were traditional. In a majority of the ex-Soviet Union countries, admittedly, the break was from a situation of dependency, not from colonisation as such: but that situation of dependency had already undermined the traditions of the countries concerned and superimposed a bureaucratic structure fashioned by the dominant Russian elite.

Not surprisingly, the political rules which emerged in these ‘new’ countries were often far from being calmly and widely followed: a process of ‘nation-building’ had to take place to (try to) ensure that the new boundaries and the new regimes of these states would be at least passively and hopefully eventually actively adopted by the populations. That process was often very slow as it entailed undermining long-standing traditions and introducing new ones. The presidential republic was to be the instrument by which the transformation was to occur: the fact that there was a president in charge of the country could be regarded as one of the best ways of ensuring that there would be support for the whole regime. Not surprisingly, however, the outcome was often merely a partial success, especially in the short run, and, meanwhile, regimes were as a result often viewed as unsuccessful, or at least as being marred by serious ‘accidents’.

While these countries were ‘new’ in terms of their borders and their political arrangements, the specific forms taken by the characteristics of these new polities varied appreciably especially among the three regions concerned, Latin America, Africa and the ex-Soviet Union, while there were also variations from one country to another within each of these three regions. Overall, the colonisation process was markedly different in Latin America in the sixteenth, seventeenth and eighteenth centuries from what it was to be in Africa in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. In the case of Latin America, the distance from the Iberian peninsula was such that the Spanish American colonies were in a sense markedly more independent from Spain, psychologically as well as administratively, than was to be the case in the African colonies, whether they were British, French, Belgian or Portuguese. On the whole, the experience which Spain bestowed on its ex-colonies was markedly less ‘bureaucratic’ than was to be the case in African colonies with the European rulers, and in particular the British and French rulers, while a strongly bureaucratic type of rule was imposed by Moscow on the Asian and South Caucasian republics which were to become independent from the Soviet Union in 1991. Moreover, the newly independent African countries emerged when the Communist regimes had developed a technique of single-party rule which had simply not existed at the time of Latin American independence and the technique was widely used between the 1960s and the early 1990s in these newly independent African states.

As a matter of fact, since the new Spanish American colonies were markedly freer from detailed bureaucratic arrangements than the new countries of Africa and of the ex-Soviet Union were to be, a large number of actors emerged when Spanish rule collapsed in Latin America: these actors had often local rather than national support, with the further consequence that political life displayed greater instability, although this was coupled with attempts made by the more successful of these actors either to return to power if they had been dismissed or to attempt to remain in power, including for long periods. Meanwhile, Brazilians acquired a substantial extent of political experience in the 70 years during which their country was an independent ‘empire’. This state of affairs may in part account for the fact that it took so long for Spanish American presidential republics to acquire what can be described as ‘established’ forms of political behaviour; it may also have accounted for the form of rule which eventually prevailed widely, if not everywhere, in the region, a form which was more akin, at least in general, to liberal-democratic arrangements than was to be the case in most African countries and to the large majority of the ex-Soviet states.

In such a context, although the presidential republics which emerged have so often been (viewed as) unsuccessful or at any rate not very effective, the apparent paradox is that the popularity of the presidential regime was maintained, even over long periods, as the example of Latin American countries shows; indeed, in many African states, presidentialism was not introduced immediately after independence, but only after an original arrangement, primarily based on the effective power being in the hands of a prime minister, was replaced after a few years by presidentialism, presumably on the ground that presidentialism would better suit the countries in question. Admittedly, the change may often have been also due to the desire of those who were leaders at the time to increase their position in their country, as they felt they would acquire more prestige, both at home and abroad, if they were presidents rather than ‘mere’ prime ministers: even though this may have been the direct reason w...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• 1  Introduction: The Need to Study the Presidential Republic as a General Phenomenon of Contemporary Government
• Part I  The General Characteristics of the Phenomenon of the Presidential Republic
• Part II  Presidential Republics in a Comparative Historical Perspective
• Part III  Presidential Republics: Their Past and Their Future
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index